Michelle Ryan was, at least for a moment, womankind's answer to Jason Bourne. She had a fearsome gym-honed body, bafflingly fast hands and feet, a satisfyingly glum backstory and admiring fans in the key US 18-35 demographic. Men wanted her, women wanted to be her. And, no doubt, vice versa - even if she was, technically speaking, part cyborg.
But Ryan was better than Bourne. Her face was chiselled rather than rubbery. Plus she had bionic vision, could leap tall buildings in a single bound, and when she kicked the bad guys in the crown jewels, they didn't reply: "That all you got?" They didn't, in general, reply at all.
Ryan was, until those damned writers went on strike in Hollywood last year and thereby nixed the 24-year-old's manifest destiny, the Bionic Woman. Even though she comes from Enfield and even though she spent five years on EastEnders as Zoe Slater, first as Cat Slater's sister and then - such is the way of things in soap reality - her daughter. She mutated from East End darling into stateside icon, becoming Jaime Sommers, a woman who made Buffy look like a wimp and Dana Scully seem a bit thick.
We're sitting over drinks in a members' club upstairs from the Ivy in London. A surprisingly tanned and slender Stephen Fry is a few tables away. As an interviewee, Ryan is as cheerful and sunny as can be. But she wasn't always like that. Is it true, I ask her, that in 2002 she was found on north London's so-called suicide bridge after a nervous breakdown?
"That story has been blown way out of proportion," Ryan says. "Pretty much all the stories are when it comes to EastEnders actors. I was 18 and, like anybody who's 18, I was going through one of those phases. I was part of huge overwhelming storylines [not only did her character's sister turn out to be her mother, she was also embroiled in a rape/abortion/murder love triangle with her boyfriend Dennis Watts and his dad, "Dirty" Den Watts]. "I was a young woman, barely that. I didn't know who I was or where I was going. Now I do. I've got a strong circle of girlfriends and a lot more life experience."
Ryan, if not a bionic woman, has rebuilt herself. Her latest assignment is a guest appearance this weekend in the Doctor Who Easter special. Its writer, Russell T Davies, hailed her for playing what the press people called "a mysterious jewel thief" called Lady Christina de Souza, who, after a heist, hooks up with the Time Lord on a double-decker bus in the desert where they must battle aliens. Like you do.
She is in awe of David Tennant, as was the last Doctor Who actor I interviewed, Dervla Kirwan (who did the Christmas special turn as a Victorian baddie). But didn't Ryan once audition to replace Billie Piper as the doctor's assistant (a role that went to Freema Agyeman)? "Not true," she says. "There are so many stories about me that aren't true."
The viewing figures, however, do not lie: Ryan had 14 million stateside viewers for the remake of Bionic Woman - the highest for an NBC TV series since the launch of The West Wing. "We really established a fan base and I did think she could be a female Bourne. I love those films and that's the kind of dark, fast, stylish mood we were going for."
When the show premiered, critics drooled. One male reviewer wrote: "Unlike Lindsay Wagner [the 70s original], who had the build and tensility of a matchstick, Ryan has shoulders broad enough to choke a crocodile." You can almost sense the critic yearning to be that crocodile.
Ryan remembers her bionic era fondly. "I have very strong legs from dancing," she explains [she was a professional dancer before EastEnders]. "One day I was on set and I had to kick this stunt guy. I warned everybody that if I kicked him, I would probably put him through the set wall - but the stunt guy was like, 'Yeah, whatever.' So I kicked him and he went through the wall. I loved it!"
She also loved training in Krav Maga, which, as the ex-Mossad agents among you will recall, is the Israeli secret service art of self-defence. "I would have to stand in a darkened room with my arms folded across my shoulders, and a man would come at me with a gun. And then I would disarm him. Then he would come at me with a knife. And I would disarm him. The idea was that these moves would become routine when we started filming. I used to walk around Vancouver [where the series was filmed] late at night thinking I could take on anyone - which, thinking back, probably wasn't that sensible."
With all due respect, why would a relative nobody from this rain-soaked dime of a country get a look-in at such an iconic American role? "I think it's because I have a very American body and looks," Ryan says. "They wanted the girl next door, but a girl next door who looked as though she might be able to look after herself. I'm big-boned and healthy-looking, you see."
There is something in this. Even on EastEnders, in which she starred for five years until 2005, she was an anomaly among the Hogarthian array of other actors on the soap. "Over there they think EastEnders is this great big deal," she laughs, and then corrects herself. "Which of course it is." Ryan was voted, the cuttings tell me, number 70 in FHM Magazine's 100 sexiest women in 2002, and number four in 2005. Even so, surely it can't be true that she beat Jennifer Aniston to her bionic role?
"Well, we certainly never met. I'd been doing a low-budget horror movie in Wales with Faye Dunaway. I did a tape in Cardiff, sent it off, and the next thing I know I'm out there meeting all these execs from NBC - people like David Icke - and they all want me to be Barnet Woman."
Hold on. Eccentric lizard idoliser David Icke, the man who believes that earth is ruled, for the most part, by beings from the fourth dimension, is an NBC exec? It turns out my ears need bionic implants. Ryan means David Eick, the producer responsible for successfully retooling another 70s series, Battlestar Galactica, for a new audience. And only after the interview do I realise that she means Bionic Woman. Barnet Woman would have been a rubbish sci-fi TV series.
Nothing, Ryan admits, in all her years on Albert Square prepared her for the thesp singledom glamour of working across the Atlantic. I ask her if, as was reported, she actually went out with Owen Wilson. "It never happened. There's this thing out there where your people call their people to see if they'd like to go out on a date. That happened a lot." Can't you just call them yourself? "That's not how it's done."
And then, one series in, Ryan's bionic dream crashed and burned. Reports suggested the producers thought the show too expensive for the ratings it was generating to warrant a second series. "It was really upsetting because we had been making a great, popular show. I thought there would be a new series after the writers' strike ended - but NBC thought the momentum we had built up had gone. So they cancelled it."
Worse still, on her return home, the welcoming committee of the British press wrote her up as yet another of those EastEnder try-hards (Martine McCutcheon, Jack Ryder, Tamzin Outhwaite) who tried to break America but got broken by it. What could Ryan do next? Would she swallow her pride and go back to EastEnders, as others have done after their career options dwindled? "There's just no way I would allow that to happen." Instead, she decided, it was time to stop buffing her body and hone her comedy skills instead.
"You know," she says, lowering her voice confidentially, "I once played a Guardian journalist. It was on stage. And I managed to get the story without having to sleep with Rod Liddle [the Sunday Times columnist]. I played an undercover reporter masquerading as an Essex girl at a Spectator party who gets really drunk." None of this is in my journalistic repertoire.
Ryan is talking about her role in Who's the Daddy?, the play based on the David Blunkett paternity case in which she appeared in 2005. "That was a comedy, so I thought I could do more along those lines."
She quickly had the opportunity, starring in Mr Eleven, an ITV comedy drama based on a newspaper story which said that, statistically, women marry their 11th sexual partner. "My character's this ditzy Bridget Jones-like mathematician who's getting married to her 11th partner and then finds out he's not her 11th at all, so the bottom falls out of her world." Is her love life like that? "I've had one serious relationship and now I'm just dating, having fun. So no."
The interview is over - she's late for couch time with Paul O'Grady. Ryan disports herself poutingly for the photographer in her Alexander McQueen shirt, then fields one last question. Would she kick me through a wall like she was bionic? Ryan charmingly rejects the suggestion, and we go our different ways - she to entrance a TV audience and pursue a glittering career, me to get bionic implants for my ears.
• Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead is on BBC1 tomorrow at 6.45pm.
But Ryan was better than Bourne. Her face was chiselled rather than rubbery. Plus she had bionic vision, could leap tall buildings in a single bound, and when she kicked the bad guys in the crown jewels, they didn't reply: "That all you got?" They didn't, in general, reply at all.
Ryan was, until those damned writers went on strike in Hollywood last year and thereby nixed the 24-year-old's manifest destiny, the Bionic Woman. Even though she comes from Enfield and even though she spent five years on EastEnders as Zoe Slater, first as Cat Slater's sister and then - such is the way of things in soap reality - her daughter. She mutated from East End darling into stateside icon, becoming Jaime Sommers, a woman who made Buffy look like a wimp and Dana Scully seem a bit thick.
We're sitting over drinks in a members' club upstairs from the Ivy in London. A surprisingly tanned and slender Stephen Fry is a few tables away. As an interviewee, Ryan is as cheerful and sunny as can be. But she wasn't always like that. Is it true, I ask her, that in 2002 she was found on north London's so-called suicide bridge after a nervous breakdown?
"That story has been blown way out of proportion," Ryan says. "Pretty much all the stories are when it comes to EastEnders actors. I was 18 and, like anybody who's 18, I was going through one of those phases. I was part of huge overwhelming storylines [not only did her character's sister turn out to be her mother, she was also embroiled in a rape/abortion/murder love triangle with her boyfriend Dennis Watts and his dad, "Dirty" Den Watts]. "I was a young woman, barely that. I didn't know who I was or where I was going. Now I do. I've got a strong circle of girlfriends and a lot more life experience."
Ryan, if not a bionic woman, has rebuilt herself. Her latest assignment is a guest appearance this weekend in the Doctor Who Easter special. Its writer, Russell T Davies, hailed her for playing what the press people called "a mysterious jewel thief" called Lady Christina de Souza, who, after a heist, hooks up with the Time Lord on a double-decker bus in the desert where they must battle aliens. Like you do.
She is in awe of David Tennant, as was the last Doctor Who actor I interviewed, Dervla Kirwan (who did the Christmas special turn as a Victorian baddie). But didn't Ryan once audition to replace Billie Piper as the doctor's assistant (a role that went to Freema Agyeman)? "Not true," she says. "There are so many stories about me that aren't true."
The viewing figures, however, do not lie: Ryan had 14 million stateside viewers for the remake of Bionic Woman - the highest for an NBC TV series since the launch of The West Wing. "We really established a fan base and I did think she could be a female Bourne. I love those films and that's the kind of dark, fast, stylish mood we were going for."
When the show premiered, critics drooled. One male reviewer wrote: "Unlike Lindsay Wagner [the 70s original], who had the build and tensility of a matchstick, Ryan has shoulders broad enough to choke a crocodile." You can almost sense the critic yearning to be that crocodile.
Ryan remembers her bionic era fondly. "I have very strong legs from dancing," she explains [she was a professional dancer before EastEnders]. "One day I was on set and I had to kick this stunt guy. I warned everybody that if I kicked him, I would probably put him through the set wall - but the stunt guy was like, 'Yeah, whatever.' So I kicked him and he went through the wall. I loved it!"
She also loved training in Krav Maga, which, as the ex-Mossad agents among you will recall, is the Israeli secret service art of self-defence. "I would have to stand in a darkened room with my arms folded across my shoulders, and a man would come at me with a gun. And then I would disarm him. Then he would come at me with a knife. And I would disarm him. The idea was that these moves would become routine when we started filming. I used to walk around Vancouver [where the series was filmed] late at night thinking I could take on anyone - which, thinking back, probably wasn't that sensible."
With all due respect, why would a relative nobody from this rain-soaked dime of a country get a look-in at such an iconic American role? "I think it's because I have a very American body and looks," Ryan says. "They wanted the girl next door, but a girl next door who looked as though she might be able to look after herself. I'm big-boned and healthy-looking, you see."
There is something in this. Even on EastEnders, in which she starred for five years until 2005, she was an anomaly among the Hogarthian array of other actors on the soap. "Over there they think EastEnders is this great big deal," she laughs, and then corrects herself. "Which of course it is." Ryan was voted, the cuttings tell me, number 70 in FHM Magazine's 100 sexiest women in 2002, and number four in 2005. Even so, surely it can't be true that she beat Jennifer Aniston to her bionic role?
"Well, we certainly never met. I'd been doing a low-budget horror movie in Wales with Faye Dunaway. I did a tape in Cardiff, sent it off, and the next thing I know I'm out there meeting all these execs from NBC - people like David Icke - and they all want me to be Barnet Woman."
Hold on. Eccentric lizard idoliser David Icke, the man who believes that earth is ruled, for the most part, by beings from the fourth dimension, is an NBC exec? It turns out my ears need bionic implants. Ryan means David Eick, the producer responsible for successfully retooling another 70s series, Battlestar Galactica, for a new audience. And only after the interview do I realise that she means Bionic Woman. Barnet Woman would have been a rubbish sci-fi TV series.
Nothing, Ryan admits, in all her years on Albert Square prepared her for the thesp singledom glamour of working across the Atlantic. I ask her if, as was reported, she actually went out with Owen Wilson. "It never happened. There's this thing out there where your people call their people to see if they'd like to go out on a date. That happened a lot." Can't you just call them yourself? "That's not how it's done."
And then, one series in, Ryan's bionic dream crashed and burned. Reports suggested the producers thought the show too expensive for the ratings it was generating to warrant a second series. "It was really upsetting because we had been making a great, popular show. I thought there would be a new series after the writers' strike ended - but NBC thought the momentum we had built up had gone. So they cancelled it."
Worse still, on her return home, the welcoming committee of the British press wrote her up as yet another of those EastEnder try-hards (Martine McCutcheon, Jack Ryder, Tamzin Outhwaite) who tried to break America but got broken by it. What could Ryan do next? Would she swallow her pride and go back to EastEnders, as others have done after their career options dwindled? "There's just no way I would allow that to happen." Instead, she decided, it was time to stop buffing her body and hone her comedy skills instead.
"You know," she says, lowering her voice confidentially, "I once played a Guardian journalist. It was on stage. And I managed to get the story without having to sleep with Rod Liddle [the Sunday Times columnist]. I played an undercover reporter masquerading as an Essex girl at a Spectator party who gets really drunk." None of this is in my journalistic repertoire.
Ryan is talking about her role in Who's the Daddy?, the play based on the David Blunkett paternity case in which she appeared in 2005. "That was a comedy, so I thought I could do more along those lines."
She quickly had the opportunity, starring in Mr Eleven, an ITV comedy drama based on a newspaper story which said that, statistically, women marry their 11th sexual partner. "My character's this ditzy Bridget Jones-like mathematician who's getting married to her 11th partner and then finds out he's not her 11th at all, so the bottom falls out of her world." Is her love life like that? "I've had one serious relationship and now I'm just dating, having fun. So no."
The interview is over - she's late for couch time with Paul O'Grady. Ryan disports herself poutingly for the photographer in her Alexander McQueen shirt, then fields one last question. Would she kick me through a wall like she was bionic? Ryan charmingly rejects the suggestion, and we go our different ways - she to entrance a TV audience and pursue a glittering career, me to get bionic implants for my ears.
• Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead is on BBC1 tomorrow at 6.45pm.
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